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Drew Bennett was enjoying Dolores Park one weekend, hanging out with some friends, when his phone rang. Mark Zuckerberg, the caller told him, would be at his studio that afternoon.

So Bennett left his friends, hopped on his bike, and pedaled across San Francisco to the Dogpatch, down near the bay. He didn't expect the visit from Zuckerberg, but he had a little time to prepare, hanging some of his artwork around the studio walls.

When Zuckerberg arrived, the Facebook founder and CEO sat down in a chair at the center of the studio and took it all in. "So," he said, "what am I looking at?"

Zuckerberg must have liked Bennett's answer—not to mention his art, a collection meant to show people coming together. Facebook soon hired Bennett to decorate the walls of its offices in downtown Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco. The year was 2007, and he spent four months painting a series of murals inside Facebook, working "every night, all night."

He wasn't the first artist to use Facebook as a canvas—or the last. In exchange for some Facebook stock—which ultimately made him very rich—graffiti artist David Choe tricked out the walls at Facebook's original office, on Palo Alto's Emerson Street, and so many other artists followed—with their paints, brushes, and spray cans—as the company expanded into newer campuses.

But Bennett would do more than just paint those murals. A childhood friend of Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox, he returned to the company five years later, and eventually, he bootstrapped a formal artist-in-residence program at Facebook's current offices, a massive campus in Menlo Park, California. At any given time, at least one artist is set up inside the company—and perhaps as many as three—creating art on the walls and the doorways and the stairwells and the ceilings. "The dialog between many different visual languages," Bennett says, "is inherently more interesting than any one visual language alone."

As much as PHP code and "The Hacker Way," art is a fundamental part of the Facebook culture. Art doesn't just decorate Facebook's offices, it defines them, and in this way, Bennett says, it helps shape the company's attitude. Facebook, its top engineers like to say, is a company of builders. They build things inside machines—desktops and laptops and smartphones—and all around them, artists build things in the physical world. One feeds the other—at least in small ways.

"It's a visual and a physical manifestation of what's happening on the computers," Bennett says. "You could just present your values on a piece of paper. But inviting a diverse group of independent artists to work alongside us is a more genuine expression of that creative process."

Corporate art is an old thing. But this is something different. All Facebook art is commissioned ("We only support new work being made," Bennett says). It's much rawer than what you'd find at, say, JP Morgan. And it's not necessarily an investment. Most of it is physically part of the office and therefore difficult to move, let alone sell—though the company has moved some of Choe's art from office to office. Facebook art is more about vibe than anything else.

At the original Facebook office, Choe's murals were, in Bennett's words, "kind of aggressive." One piece showed a rather bare woman riding some sort of fanged beast—the sort of thing recently lampooned in HBO's spot-on parody of the Northern California startup community: Silicon Valley. And according to Jet Martinez, who painted a mural on the current campus in 2012, at least part of this anything-goes attitude persisted as the company evolved.

Martinez came to the company through an art consultant named Danielle Wohl—"Like everything at Facebook," he says, "she had a personal connection to someone who worked there"—and in 2012, he was paid about $4,000 to paint Bouquet, an enormous burst of flowers, in Building 17. Facebook's art scene, he says, was "like the wild west." He remembers coming in one morning to find that Choe and others had "destroyed the building," running through the halls, dragging lines of paint across wall after wall after wall. "Nobody was in charge," he says, "and nobody wanted to be in charge."

Since then, Bennett has organized the company's art efforts into something more formal and regular—a reflection of Facebook's larger maturation. Each artist receives a standard honorarium—not stock—in exchange for the rights to their work, so they're not in Menlo Park to get rich. They work for between four and 16 weeks. And they're treated much like any other employee. They're required to spend at least some time working in what's called the Analog Research Lab—a silkscreen studio founded by two guys named Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak—helping create the many prints and posters that also line the company's walls. "They're hired on as peers," Bennett says.

But Bennett makes a point of saying artists are free to paint and build what they want. Kelly Ording, who's married to Jet Martinez, later joined this artist-in-residence program, painting a series of murals in Menlo Park. She was paid $10,000 for the work, which seems to be the going rate, but she says it wasn't the money that attracted her. There's the publicity that comes with the Facebook name, but there's also the work itself. She calls her project "experimental"—something designed to transform an entire space, on all sides—and she could take it where she wanted to take it. "They really encourage you," she says, "to take risks."

As that Silicon Valley parody shows, this kind of thing has become a touchstone for the rest of the startup world. "You go to other corporate spaces and they're almost buying the Facebook package," says Martinez. "This comes with snack bars, Razor scooters—and murals." But Facebook still takes things further than most.

Alan Bamberger, who chronicles the art business, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, for the site ArtBusiness.com, says Bennett has fostered something unusual in Menlo Park. "I haven't seen anyone think this through, to this extent," he says. "It's really using Facebook as kind of a laboratory for art." And now, Bennett and company have brought the same idea to the company's new offices in both New York and Dublin. On some level, the art fits the locale—"In New York," Bennett says, "it's a little more urban"—but the basic vibe is the same.

It's a vibe that envelops you (see images above, from Menlo Park and New York). You're surrounded at nearly every turn, both inside the building and outside, in the halls and the common rooms and the kitchens. This includes countless murals, but also installations—most notably a DNA-like spiral of recycled wood from Barbara Holmes that snakes through a stairwell at the heart of the Menlo Park campus—and so much of the other wall space is filled with those prints and posters, which feed the Facebook attitude in other ways, trumpeting maxims like "Fortune Favors the Bold," "Move Fast and Build Things," "Nothing At Facebook Is Somebody Else's Problem," and "What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?"

"We, as a company, have a unique opportunity to own our space," Bennett says. "That same spirit that Mark honored David Choe with, we still honor today."